I have recently upgraded my MB to a Asus A8V Deluxe/Wifi-G. My graphics card is a Radeon 9800 Pro. After the upgrade I got a lot of system crashes especially while running Rome Total War. The support suggested I try setting AGP to 4x. That seems to have solved the problem but I also suppose it gives me lower performence although I didn't directly noticed it in FS.Does anyone have any idea about why I have to set AGP to 4x? Does 8x means more heat in the graphics card chip?Actually I didn't encountered the crash while running FS9 at 8x but I didn't test very long about 30 min. In RTW the crash happens after around 5 minutes at most or even after som 10 seconds.

It has something to do with the Radeon ATI and certain SIS chipsets on motherboards.I do not really know that much about it but do a search on this site>>http://www.motherboards.org/forums/search.phpSearch in the Tech Support forrum for your motherboard model and then maybe your chipset modelallen

The jump from 2x to 4x AGP was a big enough yawn, and the jump from 4x to 8x is downright snooze material. I would be extremely surprised if the difference in performance between 4x and 8x AGP in FS is more than 0.5% - more like neglible. If you don't believe me, try setting your AGP to 2X and be similarly unwowed by the performance difference from 4x.If your system is stable at 4X, then leave it there and be happy :)

>If your system is stable at 4X, then leave it there and be>happy :) I concur and I appreciate the point. Saves me 400 bucks too for a new MB and CPUallen

I saw a noticble increase in FPS when I went from 4x to 8x. Granted not "double" the FPS but I gained I think on average about 3-4fps which is huge in Flightsim terms especially if you are right on the edge of stuttering and if you are hovering on single frame digits.It is a driver issue I am fairly sure. That's what is was for me. Make sure your MB Bios and AGP chipset have their latest versions. After updating make sure your MB is set to run at 8x using your BIOS setup at boot-up. I bought an Asus rated at 8x and guess what... it didn't come loaded with 8x drivers! Always thought you just had to settle for 4x.... WRONG! Don't forget DirectX 9.0c and load up/re-install the latest ATI cat drivers (5.6) last.good luck